The internet's most popular search engine Google has been accused of supporting Chinese internet controls by omitting contentious news stories from search results in China.

State-sponsored internet providers in China routinely block access to internet sites deemed inappropriate by the government. These include both Chinese and foreign news sites carrying reports that criticise the Chinese government.

Researchers at Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a US company that provides technology for circumventing internet restrictions in China, have discovered that the recently-launched Chinese version of Google News omits blocked news sources from its results.

The origin of a computer sending a search request can be identified using its internet protocol (IP) address.more>>

Wow. Never thought I'd see the day when the government is able to choke internet content. What comes next? All posts to the internet must be government approved as well? Or maybe there will be a rep from each government to create a global committee to censor internet content. Another sad day in the world of communications.

yes but a company has to obey the rules of the country in which they do business.
Sure China has some of the worst human rights issues but what can google do, if they say no to the censorship then China's government may just block the entire google service "in theory"

what a nice and open minded country china is, hosting the next olmypic summer games !

cheers

usch

geez...i never thought that china will be over-sensitive about the internet content.

Of course the Chinese government would be over-sensitive. They don't want too many people to get the "wrong" idea about how they run the country and bring things down. They're doing what's in their best interests, regardless of whether it's in the people's interests or not.

Well I hope that censorship never makes it out into the wide internet as a whole, the internet was originnally built for military and government use wasnt it ? I hope that if anything like this ever happens that somebody would create an alternative. Could the chinese not just create an entirely new protocol instead of http ? It would by them a short time but I guess that would be shutdown eventually.

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

For those of you interested I found this on google.

its cheaper to filter content and send people to jail than it is to create a new internet standard for a large country

I really don't see what the big deal is, this isn't anything new other than someone realizing google is blocking some content to them. I think its a horrible thing to do, but then again i would never live in China anyway...


just my two cents...

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/

Wanna get shot go to china and search China's DownFall

and search China Goverment Sucks.

who are we to say what is good and what is evil?

who are we to say what sucks and what rocks?

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. ~Claude-Adrien Helvétius

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.